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What is ethnography good for?

What is ethnography good for?

ANTH 1001: Introduction to anthropology

Ryan Schram

Week of May 31, 2021 (Week 13)

Slides available at http://anthro.rschram.org/2700/2021/13

Who reads ethnographies?

Here’s another story about Auhelawa susu and their tetela:

• Tetela are used in land dispute mediations.
• Tetela can be cross-referenced.
• Tetela are passed on to those who are chosen to hear them.
• Most people know most of the facts of each other’s tetela.

Many people in Auhelawa wanted me to collect everyone’s tetela, and decide which were right and which were wrong.

Scholarship is accountable to its audiences, but who are anthropologyʻs audiences?

Anthropologists do not practice anthropology in Cloud-cuckoo-land.

We do anthropology in the real world, as a member of several communities

• We are part of a community of other anthropologists
• We are part of a larger society, and often rely on taxpayer money to fund our research.
• We are part of an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world.

Yet anthropologists like to see themselves as outsiders in their own societies and in the societies they study.

Who are our audiences?

Salvage anthropology

Franz Boas is an important founding figure of cultural anthropology in the United States, and is responsible for the concept of culture as a shared world view. For Boas, culture is

• A comprehensive, integrated system of thought
• Shared among members of a single community
• Particular to that community

Anthropologists think in terms of cultural relativism based on Boas’s argument that culture is a whole.

While Boas and his students were interested in each culture’s unique path of development, they also sought to document Native American cultures they feared would disappear.

Their ethnographic projects were a “salvage” operation to record a disappearing way of life and way of thinking.

• They relied on interviews with people who had experieced an intact cultural pattern.
• Their ethnographic descriptions were a reconstruction of a past society rather than of one in which they immersed themselves.
• Though a minority, some still do salvage anthropology (or “urgent anthropology”). Is there a good reason for this to be done?

Scientific expertise

Like other fields, many anthropologists have claimed that they had expertise as scientists of human societies and their cultures.

• W. H. R. Rivers investigated the reasons for what was believed to be a declining birth rate among colonized peoples of the Pacific.
• Anthropologists after Malinowski viewed each society as a functionally integrated whole, like a machine or living organism. They advocated for colonial policies of noninterference.

For the most part, colonial governments had little interest in anthropologists’ studies (see Kuper 1973).

Theories of society

As more people were trained as ethnographers in the Boasian or Malinowskian sense, anthropology became a profession

• It sought to separate itself as much as possible from the general public, other fields, and from government.
• It turned inward; anthropologists spoke mainly to other anthropologists.
• Its goals were to use ethnography to pursue greater and more abstract understanding of human societies in general.

While this may seem to have no positive impact, there are reasons why it is good for anthropological research to be carried out for its own sake and purely for the goal of developing new ideas.

Yet, at the same time, this view relies on a faith in rationality, and a faith in people’s capacity to control the world through reason alone. It belongs to a specific period in world history.

Anthropology as critique

Anthropologists do not all want to be scientists, although many want to remove themselves from society.

They speak back to their own society from the position of a critic and skeptic. Their ethnographic cases are sources of inspiration for social alternatives in their own societies.

Even when used as a basis for critique, ethnography always involves objectifying people (see Bell 2014)

Should anthropology then have another kind of audience, the people that are described in ethnography?

The injustices that research ethics cannot solve

• No society exists in isolation.
  • Auhelawa people live on an island, but they are connected to everyone else in the world, although on unequal terms.
  • Someone can hold themselves to the highest possible standard of ethical behavior toward research subjects, but none of their conduct would do anything to remedy or ameliorate their unequal position with respect to the people they study.
• According to Pels (1999), when we talk about the fieldwork situation in terms of ethical obligations is to erase the deeper asymmetries and inequalities in the situation which can only be addressed through politics. Ethical codes make the researcher into a saint and savior.
• Rather than talk about what we shouldn’t do in research, let’s talk about ethical value of learning about each other’s differences.

“Ethnographic refusal”

Some argue that the “primitive isolate” image in ethnography is not only a distortion, but represents an ethical failure of anthropologists to document and critique forms of inequality and oppression experienced by the people they study.

• Laura Nader calls on anthropologists to “study up” (Nader 1972).
  • Anthropologists tend to study people who have less social and political power than themselves. They should instead seek to gain access to the people and communities with more power, that is, social, economic, and political elites. “Studying up” should investigate the social forces and cultural ideas that place elites in positions of dominance.
• By contrast, Sherry Ortner speaks of an “ethnographic refusal.” Ortner means specifically the refusal by an anthropologist to emphasize the emic perspective over an etic perspective (Ortner 1995)
  • Ortner’s concept of ethnographic refusal is when an anthropologist foregrounds the effects of colonialism and integration with the global system of capitalism as an explanation for people’s contemporary life, and refuses to look at these experiences in emic terms as part of a particular worldview.
  • One example is the way people talk about so-called “cargo cults” in PNG. Are they an example of “episodic time” or do they represent people’s resistance to colonial domination (Billings 2002; Burridge 1954; Errington 1974; Robbins 2004; Kaplan 1995; Lattas 2007; McDowell 1988)?

How might ethnography speak to its own object?

More recently, scholars have revived this label and argued for a positive interpretation of refusal. When they use the term, they mean refusal to represent specific topics in published academic ethnographic writings, and instead collaborate with their informants on ways to for them to speak for themselves and create knowledge about themselves that is valuable for their community (Simpson 2007)

• Intellectual ownership
• Secrecy
• Refusal to make people into ethnographic objects

References

Bell, Kirsten. 2014. “Resisting Commensurability: Against Informed Consent as an Anthropological Virtue.” American Anthropologist 116 (3): 511–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12122.

Billings, Dorothy K. 2002. Cargo Cult as Theater: Political Performance in the Pacific. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books. http://books.google.com?id=htaAAAAAMAAJ.

Burridge, K. O. L. 1954. “Cargo Cult Activity in Tangu.” Oceania 24 (4): 241–54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40328944.

Errington, Frederick. 1974. “Indigenous Ideas of Order, Time, and Transition in a New Guinea Cargo Movement.” American Ethnologist 1 (2): 255–67. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1974.1.2.02a00030.

Kaplan, Martha. 1995. Neither Cargo Nor Cult: Ritual Politics and the Colonial Imagination in Fiji. Duke University Press.

Kuper, Adam. 1973. “Anthropology and Colonialism.” In Anthropologists and Anthropology : The British School, 1922-1972, 123–49. New York: Pica Press. http://archive.org/details/anthropologistsa0000kupe.

Lattas, Andrew. 2007. “Cargo Cults and the Politics of Alterity: A Review Article.” Anthropological Forum 17 (2): 149–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/00664670701438407.

McDowell, Nancy. 1988. “A Note on Cargo Cults and Cultural Constructions of Change.” Pacific Studies 11 (2): 121–34.

Nader, Laura. 1972. “Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying Up.” In Reinventing Anthropology, edited by Dell Hymes, 284–311. New York: Pantheon Books.

Pels, Peter. 1999. “Professions of Duplexity: A Prehistory of Ethical Codes in Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 40 (2): 101–36. https://doi.org/10.1086/200001.

Robbins, Joel. 2004. “On the Critique in Cargo and the Cargo in Critique: Toward a Comparative Anthropology of Critical Practice.” In Cargo, Cult, and Culture Critique, edited by Holger Jebens, 243–60. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press.

Simpson, Audra. 2007. “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship.” Junctures 9: 67–80.